Alyssa Cole On the Magic of Writing Romance

Author (and Shondaland.com contributor!) Alyssa Cole is living the dream. She splits her time between the East Coast and the Caribbean, lives with a loving partner, and gets paid to let her imagination run wild.

As the author of multiple historical and contemporary romance novels, Cole has always featured protagonists spanning a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. Whether she’s writing Scottish knights, Indian demi-gods, or American civil rights activists, Cole’s characters shine with unique voices and deep humanity. The first book of her newest series, "The Loyal League," is no exception: Released earlier this year, "An Extraordinary Union" follows the story of Elle Burns, a former slave with an eidetic memory who finds herself working as a spy for the Union Army. This assignment means allowing herself to be sold back into slavery, an obviously risky move for a freed woman. To make matters even more complicated, on her mission, she meets and falls in love with fellow undercover agent, Malcolm McCall — a white man.

Successfully navigating the challenges of writing an interracial romance set during the Civil War is difficult enough to do once, but to pull it off twice is truly impressive. And yet Cole has managed to do just that with her second book in the series, "A Hope Divided," which features a second McCall brother and another freed woman, Marlie Lynch, on sale November 28.

Between promoting her newest release, writing her next one, and penning recommendations for Shondaland.com, Cole made time to talk with us over Gchat (the future is now) about "A Hope Divided," the book’s surprising relevance in 2017, and her overall love of the romance genre.

Alyssa Cole: I personally love really competent hero/heroines — there’s even a name for it: competency porn! There’s just something really sexy about characters that really know what they’re doing, and are just plain good at it. Emma Barry and Genevieve Turner’s space race-set "Earth Bound" is a great example of this, with a lead engineer hero and a computer scientist heroine who’s kept from living up to her potential. This is also something I’ve found in most of Farrah Rochon’s books, like her latest "Trust Me," about a deputy mayor and a journalist investigating corruption. Also, basically any Courtney Milan book, but you can start with her "Brothers Sinister" series. (Note: if you learn one thing about romance readers it should be this: We LIVE to give recommendations!)

The heroine has to have agency, just as she would in any other setting, in order for it the story to really work.

I also love super supportive heroes. I mean, the heroine/partner should be supportive, too! But let’s be real: In a society where women are expected to put their dreams aside and take on the bulk of the emotional workload, I love relationships in which, whatever the conflict, the hero has the heroine’s back. In Beverly Jenkins’ "Breathless," the hero supports the heroine in her dream to open her own bookkeeping business in a time when black women weren’t expected to do such things. Supportive men can be coded as "weak" in society at large, so I particularly love books that subvert this idea and focus on what romance is really about: two (or more) people learning that they are particularly suited to facing their personal and/or societal obstacles together.

SL: To each their own, but what do you think makes a romance novel great?

AC: Oh, so many things! It can honestly depend on your mood. But the common things in the romances I enjoy the most are:

1. Great world building, where the setting of the story is integrally tied to the plot and characterization and it all combines to suck you in and make it impossible to put the book down.

2. Real emotional depth, which raises the stakes in a way that plot cannot. It’s one thing for you to want a character to survive, it’s another for you to want them to live. To be so invested in the outcome of their emotional arc that you’re afraid that something will go wrong and their possibility of happiness will be taken away — even though you know that because it’s a romance, there is the guarantee of an HEA (Happily Ever After)! (That’s the thing with romance being "formulaic" — yes, there has to be a happy ending, but you damn well better make the reader worried that there won’t be and the ways in which an author can do that are infinite.) Alisha Rai’s "Forbidden Hearts" series is a great example of this.

3. Voice. A book where the character has a really unique voice that draws you in and is super engaging always captures my interest and draws me even further into the story. Rebekah Weatherspoon’s “Haven” is great for voice.

SL: Why romance? What about the genre drew you in and made you want to play in the sandbox?

AC: The HEA, for sure. I tended to write very dark stuff, even as a kid — I mean, my favorite author was Stephen King. But even in a horror novel, the book doesn’t generally end with the character you’re rooting for losing to the forces of darkness, right? Romance works the same way. You know that even if the characters go through hell, in the end their resourcefulness and the partnership(s) they’ve formed will see them through to that HEA, and as a bonus there will hopefully be great banter and sex along the way.

And, this might seem a little sappy, but: I think romance novels are magic. I deal with depression and anxiety, and books of all kinds have always been self-care for me in periods when things were rough. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in a slump, and picked up a romance because I had to do something other than stare at the ceiling, and then found myself laughing, and crying, and feeling. That’s the magic of romance: it tells you that no matter how terrible and broken and awful you feel, no matter what ups and downs you go through in life, that you deserve love and hope and happiness. That those aren’t things you should have to compromise on. So why do I write romance? I guess because it makes me feel like a wizard.

That’s the magic of romance: it tells you that no matter how terrible and broken and awful you feel, that you deserve love and hope and happiness.

SL: How do you navigate the power dynamics that come with both race and gender when you're writing an interracial relationship in the Civil War era?

AC: Whether I’m writing SFF [Editor's note: Science Fiction and Fantasy], contemporary, or historical, I’m always really aware of power dynamics because the majority of my characters are from traditionally marginalized groups. Even if there are no white people in the book at all, that doesn’t mean that everyone is on the same playing field. Obviously, in a Civil War-set book, this becomes even more important because there is an extremely fucked up power differential just by virtue of slavery.

When I was first shopping around "An Extraordinary Union," I had a few agents who said they loved it but wanted me to make Malcolm, the hero, "darker, grittier, and more alpha," which was just a huge NO for me. The book is set in a world where white people could own black people. Having a white hero who was possessive or overbearing is the last thing this kind of story needs — I mean, that’s the villain in this setting. I tried to thread that needle very carefully — in order for the romance to work, the hero had to be aware of his societal power advantage over the heroine, or become aware of it, and actively be working to mitigate that within their relationship and in the world they’re living in. I can’t stand the Sally Hemmings/Thomas Jefferson template for historical interracial relationships (or people’s weird obsession with it), so I always try to keep that in mind as what I’m trying not to do. The heroine has to have agency, just as she would in any other setting, in order for it the story to really work.

Alyssa Cole

SL: There's a line very early on in "A Hope Divided" where your heroine, Marlie, says to her eventual love interest, Ewan, "Some arguments are not worth engaging. If you tried arguing the validity of the Confederacy, this conversation would be over." I happened to read the book during the week after the Charlottesville rally. With the tone of the national conversation around the removal of Confederate statues and about Confederate sympathizers at that time, that line really hit home. It takes a while to write a book — did you expect this topic to be this relevant when you were researching and writing these characters?

AC: Oh boy. I expected maybe slight relevancy, not white-supremacists-marching-with-torches relevancy. Not the-Klan-shall-rise-again relevancy. This has actually been really disheartening — seeing the worst aspects of American history that I’ve written about, sure that they were firmly in the past, start to zombie shuffle back onto the scene to this degree.

So on November 1 of last year, "An Extraordinary Union"’s release was a few months away, and I released a book set in 1917 Harlem. "Let Us Dream" has a black cabaret owner heroine working for women’s right to vote and a South Asian Muslim lascar who jumps ship in NYC and is screwed by the Anti-Asian Immigration Act. It, of course, has a hopeful ending. Then November 9 happens. And then the Muslim ban happens. And white supremacists start stepping out without hoods, and dog whistles start turning into regular whistles. And for a while there I just felt completely paralyzed. I felt this weird guilt, like I had betrayed my characters.

Why do I write romance? I guess because it makes me feel like a wizard.

No, I don’t think they’re real, but in a way these characters are little slivers of my ideals. Hope. Justice. Equality. It’s like putting your intentions out into the universe. And then November 9 came along and crushed all those ideals and intentions into dust. And all the nightmarish things I’d been reading about in my research, that never really stopped, were slowly becoming part of the status quo. It’s frightening. But even though I can be pessimistic, I’m trying to look at the hopeful things I’ve come across in history. And you know what? The Confederacy lost. They fucking lost. They didn’t lose by accident. They lost because they were, as a government, inept and overconfident and they didn’t have the range.

The Anti-Asian Immigration Act was eventually overturned. The Civil Rights Act was passed. So when I start seeing only the negative parallels with the past, I try to remember the positive ones. And I try to remember that good people have always been fighting for justice, and winning. The fight shouldn’t be this hard or this long, but I feel like for all the Ls we’ve taken, we’ve had some damn good wins and will have more.

SL: A recent "review" of romance novels in the New York Times shows that some people clearly still have the idea that romance novels aren't a serious genre of books read by serious people. On the contrary many books in the genre, yours in "The Loyal League" included, are incredibly detailed and meticulously written. What type of reader is "The Loyal League" actually for?

Romance gets the shit end of this stick every time for several reasons, mostly because it’s by women.

AC: Well, first, I think the idea of a "serious genre" is pretty laughable: one of the most talked about "serious" books of recent times had a hero whose wife made him sit on the toilet to pee, but because the author is a SWM (serious white male), I’m supposed to read that and try to impart some deeper meaning to it instead of laughing my ass off. I think the biggest problem with the framework of literary criticism as it relates to genre writing is that there’s this idea that "seriousness" or worth can be assigned to a book by where it’s located in the bookstore, which is ridiculous. Romance gets the shit end of this stick every time for several reasons, mostly because it’s by women, marketed to women — notice that formerly male-dominated genres have become more accepted by the literary establishment over the years. Also, romance is coded as emotional, and of course, emotions aren’t serious. They’re only the framework of every social interaction we have as humans — totally silly and unserious!

There are some people, even within the genre, who believe that romance novels are inherently less important than books in the running for the Great American Novel (whatever that means). I can’t get down with that. I’ve read so many amazing, compelling, well-written romances, and thinking otherwise is a form of literary ignorance, which is pretty ironic given that it’s usually deployed to make a group of readers and authors feel like they don’t understand good literature.

"The Loyal League" was written with romance readers in mind, but anyone can be a romance reader if they pick up the book! One of the greatest surprises of being published is hearing from people who don’t fit my "marketing demographic" who’ve really enjoyed my work.

"A Hope Divided" will be available from Kensington Books on November 28.

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